Mark Reinhold's Old Blog

The OpenJDK Charter: First Amendment

The Charter created an Interim Governance Board, with three
members from outside Sun and two from within, and empowered that Board to write
a Constitution, get it ratiﬁed by the Community, and then hold elections for
the three non-appointed seats.

The Charter speciﬁes that the Interim Governance Board shall be dissolved
after one year of existence, in particular on 8 May 2008, i.e.,
three weeks ago.

It also became clear that the interim governance guidelines were actually
working fairly well, having enabled the creation of two new Groups and many new Projects with only a couple of minorissues
having had to be referred up to the GB for review.

So, rather than focus on drafting a formalized governance document we
instead put our energy into working on the code and on the essential infrastructure to
support collaboration upon it.

Community before
governance Priorities aside, it can also be argued—as Dalibor did
during the GB’s most recent
meeting, and today in his blog—that it’s
better in principle to grow the Community a bit before attempting to formalize
its governance. A Constitution drafted and ratiﬁed during the last year would
have reﬂected the sense of the Community we have now, in which nearly all
Members are Sun employees. A Constitution drafted and ratiﬁed in the coming
year is more likely to reﬂect the sense of the Community we want, in which
there is signiﬁcant non-Sun Membership.

Given the focus during the past year upon more important priorities, and in
order to allow the Community to expand further before writing a Constitution,
the GB earlier this month asked Sun to amend the OpenJDK Charter so as to
extend the term of the initial Interim GB by one year.

Hiring Dalibor
We at Sun are very happy to have Dalibor Topić on board, but
hiring him created a bit of a problem. The Charter does not, strictly
speaking, forbid Sun employees from holding a majority of the GB seats, but
retaining the status quo would be inconsistent with the spirit of what we’re
trying to do.

An obvious solution is for one of the current Sun-employed GB Members to
step down, but that would mean losing considerable wisdom and expertise. The
GB instead asked Sun to amend the Charter so as to expand the GB from ﬁve to
seven people, with four Members from outside Sun and three from within, and to
appoint two new non-Sun Members in a timely fashion.

Moving forward
I’m happy to report that Sun agreed to the GB’s proposals on 7 May 2008 by
signing the First
Amendment to the Charter. Sun is currently reviewing a list of candidates
for the two new GB seats; we hope to see those ﬁlled very soon so that work on
the Constitution can resume.